Best Customer Retention Software to Boost Your Sales

Closing that first sale with a prospect is always a significant achievement, promising the potential for long-term customer relationships and repeat business. Yet, increasing customer lifetime value by turning a prospect into a loyal customer requires ongoing effort and attention. 

That’s where customer retention software steps in. Your retention strategy matters, but the tech and tools that you use determine how efficiently your strategies get executed. Some tools help you understand your customer data, others handle your customer queries, and some make sending effective emails easier.

However, it gets tricky when you're bombarded with complicated software options that don’t integrate with the rest of your tech stack.

This guide will talk you through the ten best customer retention software (most of which integrate with the other tech you use) to help you stay profitable and keep your customers returning.

10 Best customer retention software for ecommerce stores 

There are many ways to keep your customers loyal. From email and SMS marketing to loyalty programs, customer retention is multifaceted. And there are many tools that can help us achieve this. 

Let’s break down the list by category:

Loyalty program

Loyalty program software lets you reward customers for repeat purchases. According to CitiGroup, a whopping 86% of shoppers stick with brands that offer a loyalty program. 

Rivo

Rivo's Loyalty Program is designed to supercharge customer retention with its customizable platform. With Rivo, you can set up different types of programs like memberships and VIP tiers. Customers get rewards like discounts, free shipping, and exclusive access perks. It’s a win-win for keeping customers happy and coming back for more. 

To keep customers coming back and boost engagement, hair accessories brand Emi Jay rolled out Rivo's loyalty program, “Sparkle Rewards,” on its Shopify store. 

You earn 1 sparkle for every dollar spent, which can be redeemed for coupons on future purchases. As a result, over 4,000 Emi Jay Ladies signed up, leading to a 10% sales increase from Rewards Members. 

Here are some important features of Rivo’s loyalty program:

• Integrate in-store earnings through point-of-sale (POS).
• Earn points for engaging with your brand.
• Social Media integrations.
• Custom ways to earn points include completing surveys or watching YouTube videos.

Pricing: Start at $49/month

Email marketing tools 

Email marketing platforms help craft, deliver, and analyze email campaigns that effectively engage customers and prospects. 

Klaviyo

When seeking an email marketing tool for your Shopify ecommerce business that enhances customer retention, Klaviyo stands out as one of the most popular choices. Here’s why:

• Abandoned cart email sequences.
• Post-purchase follow-up messages.
• Syncing email lists with Facebook custom audiences.
• Tailored product recommendations.

You can also integrate Klaviyo with Rivo to directly include loyalty data about your customers in your Klaviyo email content.

For instance, Teaspressa integrated Rivo with Klaviyo, leveraging loyalty data in email campaigns. This seamless integration boosted their loyalty program, increasing customer spending with an average order value of $60. 

➡️ Here's a step-by-step guide to help you integrate Klaviyo with Rivo.

Pricing: Starting at $45/month

SMS marketing tools

Although email marketing has long been a go-to for marketers, SMS marketing is swiftly rising in popularity. The reason? It breaks through the noise more effectively than almost any other channel.

Postscript

Postscript is one of the popular SMS marketing automation platforms for ecommerce. Its key features include: 

• Generating unlimited text-to-join keywords to track opt-ins and revenue across all marketing channels.
• Collecting SMS subscribers on checkout pages, including Shopify, Shopify Plus, and custom Postscript integrations.
• Setting up a dedicated landing page with an SMS opt-in form linkable from emails or social media posts.
• Creating custom QR codes for product packaging and physical locations to convert in-person interactions into SMS subscribers.

Rivo's integration with Postscript allows Rivo Loyalty to share loyalty data seamlessly for use in Postscript campaigns. 

Rareform was successful in doing so. It uses Postscript's SMS Subscribe page to reward subscribers who enter their phone numbers with 100 points via Rivo. 

This allowed them to target loyalty members and create segments and campaigns for specific subscriber groups. As a result, Rareform’s customer repeat purchase rate increased by 26.9%, highlighting a significant boost in customer loyalty and engagement.

➡️ Here's a step-by-step guide to integrating Postscript with Rivo.

Pricing: Starts from $25/month

Attentive 

Attentive is a great option as it combines email and SMS marketing, helping ecommerce stores maintain a lean tech stack. Its features include:

• Collecting subscribers from web, social, and in-store using over 30 list growth tools
• Connecting your current marketing tools with over 100 integrations
• Assisting customers throughout their buying journey with conversational AI that delivers accurate and helpful responses.

Connecting Rivo with Attentive can enhance your SMS marketing campaigns. This powerful integration allows you to reach Loyalty program members directly and effectively, promoting special offers and promotions.

➡️ Here's a step-by-step guide to help you integrate Attentive with Rivo.

Pricing: You can contact the team to get an idea about the pricing.

Behavior analytics tool

Behavior analytics tools help you enhance your website's user experience and boost conversions. With this information, you can make informed decisions to optimize your website, ensuring a smoother and more engaging experience for your visitors. 

Tailoring your site to meet user needs will increase satisfaction and boost conversion rates.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a widely used digital experience and user behavior analytics platform that uses tools like Heatmaps, Recordings, Feedback, and Surveys to understand customer behavior and gather feedback.

It's essential for improving website usability and customer retention, as optimizing the user experience can encourage repeat purchases and boost conversion rates. 

With Hotjar, you can:

• Filter insights by customer cohorts.
• Identify website issues through rage clicks. 
• Measure customer satisfaction with post-delivery emails and send churn surveys to understand why customers leave.

Pricing: Paid plans starts from $32/month

Triple Whale 

Triple Whale's customer analytics tools help you understand your customers' shopping habits better and maximize their value to your business. They bring together all your analytics from various marketing channels (paid search and paid social), letting you compare real-time data from different platforms. This way, you can grasp the entire customer journey, from the first click to the final conversion.

Pricing: You can contact the team to get an idea about the pricing.

Customer survey tools

Customer survey tools enable businesses to collect, analyze, and leverage customer feedback across various channels. Understanding customers' preferences, dislikes, and frustrations allows for tailored adjustments to products and experiences, enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing repeat purchases.

KnoCommerce

You can integrate Rivo into your post-purchase experience with KnoCommerce to increase your customer retention rate by better understanding them. Here are the things you can do:

• Use pre and post-purchase survey templates to start collecting data and actionable insights.
• Collect valuable behavioral data directly from your customers.
• Gain insights into attribution to better understand purchasing decisions and their pain points.
• Drive stronger ROI by acting on feedback straight from the source.

Pricing: $299/month

Customer support software

Customer support tools are designed to help you manage and streamline interactions with your customer base across email, phone, and chat. Its main goal is to boost customer relationships and satisfaction, which in turn helps keep your customers coming back and increases your retention rates.

Such software usually includes handy features like systems to add support tickets, organize and track customer interactions, knowledge bases for easy self-service, and CRM software to help your support team tackle tough issues together. Plus, with built-in analytics, you can spot trends in customer behavior and agent performance, making it easier to continually improve the customer experience.

Gorgias

Gorgias is a customer service software specifically designed for customer service teams of online stores. It integrates seamlessly with Shopify, making daily ecommerce tasks like order management easy.

Like most support and collaboration tools, Gorgias offers live chat support and omnichannel support, bringing all your customer communication channels into one shared inbox for quicker responses and resolutions. And what sets Gorgias apart? Every feature, integration, and automation is tailor-made to meet the unique needs of ecommerce merchants to increase customer engagement and consequently decrease customer churn.

Here's a step-by-step guide to help you integrate Gorgias with Rivo.

Pricing: Starts from $10/month

Mobile app builder

Mobile apps are designed to help you keep your customers coming back for more. Not only can you make personalized product recommendations, but you can also send push notifications to your customers whenever you want. And they’re free.

The Shopify app store offers a variety of tools specifically geared towards building apps with just a few clicks to give your store the edge it needs to improve customer sentiment for your brand.

Tapcart

Tapcart makes it super easy to turn your Shopify store into a mobile app. In fact, no coding is needed. You can design your app using Tapcart's simple drag-and-drop builder.

With Tapcart, you can send unlimited push notification alerts directly to your app users' mobile devices, guiding them to a dedicated landing page with one-click checkout. Plus, all your efforts come together in an analytics dashboard, where you can track your app's performance and see what's working best.

Pricing: Starts from $200/month

Subscription tools

Subscription management software is all about handling an existing customer's subscription journey from start to finish through subscription-based services. It helps businesses track and manage their subscribers efficiently. These tools can range from simple ones that save you time setting up subscriptions to advanced ones offering detailed analytics and multiple ways to segment your customers.

And, if you're using Shopify to provide ongoing services, you can consider checking out Shopify subscription apps. They offer a wide range of benefits, from automation to analytics and everything in between, making it easier to keep your subscribers happy and your business running smoothly.

Skio

Skio is a Shopify app designed for managing subscription products with ease. It simplifies the setup and management of subscriptions while ensuring a user-friendly experience for customers. Moreover, Skio features fully automated billing and renewals, and it even allows free migration of existing subscriptions.

You can also use Skio to create various subscription plans with different prices and billing schedules. This flexibility lets you customize subscriptions to fit your customers' needs and test out different pricing strategies to find the most effective ones.

Pricing: $599/month

Conclusion

Customer retention tools are essential for today's businesses as they offer valuable support to organizations, especially ecommerce stores.

Integrating these into your workflow will help you automate campaigns, perform better data analysis, and save time. It will also address issues promptly, fostering customer loyalty.

Ready to see how Rivo can elevate your retention strategy? Book a demo today and discover the difference!

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